


One Step Closer

by badboy_fangirl



Category: NCIS
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-06
Updated: 2013-10-06
Packaged: 2017-12-28 13:59:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/992775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/badboy_fangirl/pseuds/badboy_fangirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ziva attends the ballet. (Tony buys a house in Tel Aviv.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	One Step Closer

**Author's Note:**

> Um, yeah, so that cannot be the end. Obviously. Title and verse lifted from Christina Perri's "A Thousand Years."

_I have died everyday waiting for you_  
Darling don't be afraid I have loved you  
For a thousand years  
I'll love you for a thousand more 

Ziva attends the ballet.

(Tony buys a house in Tel Aviv.)

She doesn't really care for the productions in Israel, so she flies to St. Petersburg, and London, and Paris. She never flies to New York, or D.C. (who knew one of the world's most renown ballet schools was right there, under her nose for the eight years she lived there?), or even San Francisco.

It would feel strange, to go to the States and _not_ see everyone, so she doesn't go there.

(Whenever Tony is in Tel Aviv, he calls. Sometimes she is there, too. Sometimes she is in Russia, or the UK, or France, so she has to tell him she can't see him for a couple days, that way she can get back before he realizes she's not really there.)

Gibbs tells her, "You don't have to give up everything you love as penance," which spoils Tony's theory that their boss would just listen.

But, of course, he does listen. He just also tells her the truth.

(She is not ready to hear it.)

 

 

The first time Tony comes back to Israel, he hasn't bought the house yet, so obviously he has to stay with her. He whispers in her ear as he hooks the Star of David around her neck, "I had to return this."

She manages to sneak it back into his jacket pocket before he leaves three days later.

(It will be ages before she realizes she gave it back because she knew he would always return it.)

 

 

Tony is so warm. 

Not just his body when he wraps his arms around her, but the way he treats her. After so many years of ball busting and platonic movie watching, it is amazing how she can ache for him because he _cares_ so much. It is in every touch, every look.

She is sitting across the dinner table from him when it hits her: This had started when Eli died. The way he took care without presuming anything; how he could tuck her into bed without even one lewd eyebrow quirk when that was all he'd ever done before, and she could just feel so safe, so protected. She could feel his concern for her sliding across her skin as easily as his fingers would, if he allowed them, but he didn't.

She had told him when she sent him away the first time, _you are so loved_ , but he showed her. He never said the words, never had to, all he had to do was be there, and she knew.

Maybe she had always known.

(She had known in Somalia, when they whipped the bag off her head and there he sat, bruised, bloody, ready to die for her.)

 

 

The third time he comes to Tel Aviv, he announces cheerfully that he bought a house. Ziva does not know what to say, so she says nothing. His smile falters, but the light doesn't leave his eyes.

She cannot do anything to extinguish that, he is a DiNozzo, after all.

Finally, when she can formulate words, she asks, "What part of the city is it in?"

"Would you like to see it?" he responds. "I'll even let you drive," he smirks, tossing her the keys of his rental.

She follows his directions and makes him carsick on the way.

It is the first time she has laughed in eight months.

 

 

"Ziva, my favorite little ninja," he sing-songs, walking from the kitchen of her apartment to the bedroom, and before she can shout a warning out, he pushes the door open with the flat of his hand.

She's got her underwear on, thankfully, but she had been changing into work-out pants and a t-shirt because he wanted to go for a walk. But still, it is the most naked she has ever been with him, at least since she started caring if he saw her naked.

He freezes in the doorway, his arm outstretched, holding the door ajar, and he just looks at her. And looks, and _looks_. She can feel her face flushing, the burning somewhere between humiliation and desire, because she knows she wants him to look at her, has wanted something beyond what they are playing at for a long while now, but his mouth just tightens briefly and his eyes come back to hers. "You need to eat more," he says, and just like that, the tension evaporates.

Part of her thinks maybe he just wants to be the caretaker, or that perhaps Gibbs sent him there to keep tabs on her ( _Made him buy a house, really, Ziva?_ asks Abby's disbelieving voice inside her head even though she hasn't spoken to her friend in almost a year), but she can remember the kiss, the one at the plane, the one that said everything in a few short seconds to stretch across a lifetime.

She snatches her t-shirt from the foot of her bed and drags it over her head. "I only seem to be hungry when you are here," she replies truthfully.

Tony cocks his head as a smile tugs at his lips. "Good thing I bought a house, then, isn't it?" he asks rhetorically as she pulls her pants on.

 

The fifth time Tony is in Tel Aviv, they almost have sex.

Ziva sort of loses her shit, and just makes a grab for him, and before he can think about it, he's responding. He's doing what she knows he's wanted to do since the first time they met, but then he stops it, because, well, things are so very much different than the first time they met.

His forehead rests against hers, and his breath puffs against her lips, and she understands hunger in an entirely different way.

He mutters, "Not yet," and pulls himself from the tangle of her arms and legs, shoving himself up off the couch.

She wants to ask, "Why not?" but for the first time, possibly ever, she sees that Tony actually has good judgement from time to time.

He hadn't said, _No_ or _This isn't right,_ he had said _Not yet._

So Ziva asks, "When?"

He looks at her from across the room, his eyes hard with resolution. "When you tell me where you fly off to all the time."

Ziva snorts. "Like you cannot just access my flight records and find out?"

Tony squints at her and then shakes his head. "I shouldn't have to investigate you, or hunt you down, every time I want to see you."

She smooths her blouse back into its proper place, straightening her bra beneath it. He hadn't unhooked it, but he had certainly gotten his hands full anyway. She feels defensive, for good reason. She doesn't want to talk about the ballet. So she takes the Star of David off and gets up to cross the room to him. She presses the necklace into his hand. "Maybe you shouldn't see me so often, then," she murmurs, locking eyes with him until she sees how it wounds him.

He keeps coming back for her, no matter how many times she tells him not to. She can't think of another way to make him leave for good. 

Sex would have done it, she's certain. But he won't even let her have that.

(He will never let it be over.)

 

 

He stays away for a long while after that.

Sometimes she finds herself reaching for the non-existent jewel around her neck, and she starts to understand that he has to come back, or she is incomplete. 

She needs her necklace.

She needs the way he doesn't expect anything, but gives so much anyway.

She has always needed him, in all the ways she never wanted to need anyone. All the miles, and months, between them have never changed that.

She tells herself not to worry, he'll be back. He always comes back for her; he has never left her.

(No, it was always she who left.)

(Why does he keep coming back?)

(Why hasn't he come yet?)

 

 

She goes to the outdoor market to see if the fish is any good. She smiles at the locals who have started to recognize her from her weekly visits, but she isn't overly friendly. She doesn't share information like _I just live around the corner_ , or _I have been back in Israel for 15 months after living for eight years in America._ She doesn't say anything, except haggle over prices and offer money when she sees a good cut of meat.

She walks home, and thinks about NCIS. She remembers going days without sleeping when they were hunting particularly heinous criminals down, when leads and scenarios and probable cause were the only things on her mind. (Well, not the _only_ thing. Never the only thing.)

She remembers how the lights would go down low in the late evening, and she would sit doing paper work, her gaze perpetually drawn to Tony as he scribbled his own reports. He would sigh heavily under duress when he couldn't get a hold of the people at Chase Visa for some credit card offer or something. (He often did non work-related things in the dusky half-light.)

She sat behind her desk many nights, when it dwindled down to just them, when Gibbs had left because the bad guys were put away but the paperwork he could delegate without worry, and Tim would shut down his computer and offer a muted, "'Night, Ziva," as he passed by. Tony would still be there, and she would think about it. Right there, in the place where they would obviously _never_ do it, if they were ever going to do it, but still. Her sexual fantasies inevitably narrowed to her straddling him on his office chair, or her following him into the men's room where he would bitch about her stalking him only to gratefully shut up when she undid his pants and took him in her hand.

With thoughts of all the things she never did back then floating in her head, when she arrives back at her apartment, she finds she can't stay there. Part of her knows she needs to call him, but the other part, the part that thinks maybe she has driven him away for good cannot mess that up.

So, instead she gets her car keys and drives to Tony's house, the one he hasn't been to visit in more than six months. She lets herself inside with the key he gave her. Even though he's probably only been there a handful of days in the time he's owned it, there are enough inescapably Tony-like things about it that it comforts her, just to be there.

She cooks her fish in his kitchen, and then later she sleeps in the Queen-sized bed in the master bedroom. She knows he bought it for the two of them, even if he would never admit it. She lies under the crisp white sheet and wonders what he thought about on those late work nights. The thing with them was that they always made the sexual tension between them a joke, and while Ziva certainly had thoughts, there had never been a driving need to explore it. Her imaginings had been enough for the most part because the rest of their relationship was about so many other things.

(And besides, Gibbs would have murdered them.)

It's funny how she wants him more now, when she isn't faced with seeing him every day, when she doesn't have to tolerate his innuendo, when he can't smirk at her until she dreams of wiping it completely off his face by shocking him with some risque move.

She has loved Tony far longer than she has desired him. In the beginning she knew he'd be a good, fun fuck. She'd almost let it go that far when they'd been undercover and had to 'pretend to have sex.' It wouldn't have been that strange to blow off steam with each other and never think of it again.

And she could not have known then how much he would come to mean to her, because it was so gradual between them; sneaky, like Tony. It was almost as if one day she woke up, unable to imagine her life without him, and so she promptly went about proving that she didn't need him.

And then there was that little niggling voice that assured her the only proper thing to do was not have what she wanted most.

But Tony would not listen to that.

(At least, she hopes so.)

 

 

Very Special Agent Anthony DiNozzo buys a house in Tel Aviv because he's madly in love with an Israeli woman who he thinks would rather die than admit that having him in her life is important to her.

He would blame Mossad in general if he didn't have a very intimate knowledge of the way Ziva's mind works. She's the steadiest hand you could ever have to back you, save Leroy Jethro Gibbs, but she's the very essence of chaos when it comes to romance.

Tony knows; he's been trying to repair her love life as long as he's known her. In some ways he had always thought that if he could see her settled and happy, it would make the inaccessible knot of love he has for her loosen and leak out of his chest, and maybe he could go on with his life. He could just enjoy women for short periods of time, but go home to his immaculate apartment in D.C., play a little piano, and go to bed alone in perfect peace.

But then Ziva had to physically remove herself from his life, and all of a sudden he realized that feeling in his chest for her was never going to go away. Not with years passing by, or rules that Gibbs drilled into his head, or the sad eyes of a woman who didn't really think she could be forgiven for what life had made of her.

So, his grand plan, while neither grand, nor particularly well thought out, became going to visit her without an invitation, and then buying a dwelling spot that showed her he intended to be a permanent part of her life whether she liked it or not, and...well, can you see where this is going? It wasn't ever going to end well for him, DiNozzo knows this, but he just couldn't help that eternal optimism that Abby claimed was his "best attribute. You know, besides the fact that you're good, and kind, and you really love Ziva, Tony, and she's just gonna cave one day, I know it, so don't give up, okay? Promise me," she had said rather maniacally, grasping the lapels of his suit, mangling the expensive fabric in her urgent fists, "promise _me_ you won't give up on her, on you, on you _guys_. Promise!"

He stands in the doorway of the bedroom of his Israeli house, watching Ziva sleep soundly in his bed, and he can't help but feel this immense tenderness well up for her, because she really isn't an agent anymore. She hadn't heard him come in, she didn't sleep with a gun under her pillow, and the absolute truth is, he's totally getting hard just looking at her lying there, which makes her much more dangerous than she ever was before when she could kill him without blinking.

Now, she's killing him slowly, torturously. He doesn't know what to do, he's afraid to cross a line that means something significant to him when she might just be trying to use it against him, and all he does is think and think and _think_ , and, _god_ , that is just not what he was built to do.

"Tony?" she asks sleepily, and he wonders how long he's been standing there, gaping.

"Hey," he says, finally walking all the way into the room. He sets his duffle down next to the overstuffed corner chair and drapes his sport coat over the arm. "I was planning on calling you once I got here, I didn't realize you'd moved in while I was gone." He thinks he pulls that off, says it with just the right mix of cheer and snark, so it can be a joke, or not.

(It's all a big fucking joke, the last year and a half of his life where he has just gone back and forth from one place of limbo to the next.)

Ziva sits up and rubs at her eyes. "What time is it?" she asks, looking around. The clock on the beside table reads _7:08am_. He can feel her trying to get her bearings, and though it's on the tip of his tongue to demand to know why she's there, in his bed, doing just what he wants her to, even though she will make no declarations about it, he manages to not say a word.

It's a freaking Christmas Miracle, in the middle of July.

When her eyes return to his, her face changes, this expression one he hasn't seen in a long time. It's almost like she's seeing him, really seeing him, for the first time.

"I missed you," she says softly.

Yep, hard as a rock. He's so easy. He's so whipped. God, he just loves her so much, and he wants to do right by her, but he needs to know, desperately, if any of this is getting her to a good place.

"Ziva..."

She throws the covers back on the other side of the bed, the one she hadn't been sleeping on. Her hand pats the pillow invitingly, and she tips her head, just a little.

He doesn't know how that is how he knows, but it is. He doesn't know what happened, but he does know he didn't actually have anything to do with it. He has no idea what will happen after this, but he's waited long enough.

(He strips off all his clothes before he climbs in the bed with her, and her face changes again, but this time it's the hungry huntress look that he remembers well. She has found her prey, and she's not letting him go. He willingly offers himself as a sacrifice.)

 

 

Naked, replete, somehow teary eyed after some pretty good sex, Tony just lays on his back and holds her against him, hopeful she's not about to scramble away from him.

She lifts her head and asks, "Want to go to the ballet with me?"

(The answer is yes; it was _always_ yes.)


End file.
